Dallas Mavericks owner and billionaire tech investor Mark Cuban lost about $870,000 worth of tokens this weekend after likely clicking on a phishing link following “months of inactivity.”
Phishing attacks trick users into disclosing sensitive data, downloading malware and making their private information public. Such attacks are very common in the crypto industry, as users may fail to check the source of requests on a crypto wallet, or unknowingly download a fake application that mimics the original – an application that exists solely to possess to steal.
Cuban’s wallet was looted of US-pegged stablecoins, staked ETH (stETH), SuperRare (RARE) tokens, and some Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domains. blockchain data shows. These movements were spotted first by on-chain sleuth @wazzcrypto.
Later, Cuban was likely alerted to these transactions and managed to save more than $2.5 million worth of MATIC tokens from Polygon by logging into the wallet and transferring the tokens to a Coinbase exchange address .
The phishing attack apparently stemmed from a fake MetaMask wallet application downloaded by Cuban, he said told DLNews.
This was the second phishing attack in as many weeks to target a high-profile individual. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s X account was hacked in a phishing attack in early September. Buterin didn’t seem to lose his own money, but users lost a total of $700,000 by sending tokens to an illegal link that was apparently endorsed from Buterin.